On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 12:12:18AM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> * Nicolas Pitre <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > This patch moves the core mutex code over to the atomic helpers from
> > previous patch. There is no change for i386 and x86_64, except for
> > the forced unlock state that is now done outside the spinlock (doing
> > so doesn't matter since another CPU could have locked the mutex right
> > away even if it was unlocked inside the spinlock). This however
> > brings great improvements on ARM for example.
>
> i'm wondering how much difference it makes on ARM - could you show us
> the before and after disassembly of the fastpath, to see the
> improvement?
>
> your patches look OK to me, only one small detail sticks out: i'd
> suggest to rename the atomic_*_contended macros to be arch_mutex_*_...,
> i dont think any other code can make use of it. Also, it would be nice
> to see the actual ARM patches as well, which make use of the new
> infrastructure.
I'm personally a little worried about the recent proliferation of
atomic_*.
My take on atomic_* functions has always been: a "sensible" arch [1]
implements the functionality in a single atomic instruction and this
simply exposes that instruction at the C level which otherwise lacks
appropriate semantics.
So functions like atomic_dec_call_if_negative seem a) excessively
special purpose b) not fundamental in the
ought-to-be-a-single-instruction sense c) a bit out of place in the in
the atomic_* set. These might even encourage people to roll their own
special-purpose locking primitives and we have way too many of those
already.
[1] In Linus' famous sense of what an ideal architecture should look like
--
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.
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